IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB081395084

Riotous Assemblage and the Materials of Regulation (2018)

Bulstrode, Jenny (Author)

History of Science
Volume: 56
Issue: 3
Pages: 278-313

DOI: 10.1177/0073275318776187

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275318776187

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Glass and glassmaking Science and society Capitalism 19th century Denton, Edward John Beaufort, Sir Francis Peel, Robert A. Airy, George Biddell British Museum Antiquarian Horological Society

In the stores of the British Museum are three exquisite springs, made in the late 1820s and 1830s, to regulate the most precise timepieces in the world. Barely the thickness of a hair, they are exquisite because they are made entirely of glass. Combining new documentary evidence, funded by the Antiquarian Horological Society, with the first technical analysis of the springs, undertaken in collaboration with the British Museum, the research presented here uncovers their extraordinary significance to the global extension of nineteenth century capitalism through the repeal of the Corn Laws. In the 1830s and 1840s the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy; the Hydrographer to the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort; and the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, collaborated with the virtuoso chronometer-maker, Edward John Dent, to mobilize the specificity of particular forms of glass, the salience of the Glass Tax, and the significance of state standards, as means to reform. These protagonists looked to glass and its properties to transform the fiscal military state into an exquisitely regulated machine with the appearance of automation and the gloss of the free-trade liberal ideal. Surprising but significant connections, linking Newcastle mobs to tales of Cinderella and the use of small change, demonstrate why historians must attend to materials and how such attention exposes claims to knowledge, the interests behind such claims, and the impact they have had upon the design and architecture of the modern world. Through the pivotal role of glass, this paper reveals the entangled emergence of state and market capitalism, and how the means of production was transformed in vitreous proportions.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB081395084/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Edward J. Gillin; (2020)
Mechanics and mathematicians: George Biddell Airy and the social tensions in constructing time at Parliament, 1845–1860 (/isis/citation/CBB360564650/)

Article Mischa Suter; (2017)
Debt and Its Attachments: Collateral as an Object of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Liberalism (/isis/citation/CBB850632526/)

Article Stéphane Guy; (2019)
From Industrial Change to Historical Inevitability: Annie Besant’s Socialism and the Philosophies of History (/isis/citation/CBB070251635/)

Article Grettler, David; (2001)
The Nature of Capitalism: Environmental Change and Conflict over Commercial Fishing in Nineteenth-Century Delaware (/isis/citation/CBB000101037/)

Article Dylan Riley; Rebecca Jean Emigh; Patricia Ahmed; (2021)
The Social Foundations of Positivism: The Case of Late-Nineteenth-Century Italy (/isis/citation/CBB782716699/)

Article Edward J. Gillin; (2020)
Tremoring Transits: Railways, the Royal Observatory and the Capitalist Challenge to Victorian Astronomical Science (/isis/citation/CBB004881409/)

Article Stephen J. Rockel; (2019)
The Tutsi and the Nyamwezi: Cattle, Mobility, and the Transformation of Agro-Pastoralism in Nineteenth-Century Western Tanzania (/isis/citation/CBB644679714/)

Thesis Kasey Marie Sease; (2021)
Marketing Agencies for Science: Nonprofits, Public Science Education, and Capitalism in Modern America (/isis/citation/CBB197222725/)

Article Simon Naylor; (2015)
Log Books and the Law of Storms: Maritime Meteorology and the British Admiralty in the Nineteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB583747568/)

Chapter Brusius, Mirjam; (2013)
From Photographic Science to Scientific Photography: Talbot and Decipherment at the British Museum around 1850 (/isis/citation/CBB001500502/)

Book Caygil, Marjorie; Cherry, John; (1997)
A.W. Franks: Nineteenth-century collecting and the British Museum (/isis/citation/CBB000077144/)

Article Malley, Shawn; (2012)
Nineveh 1851: An Archaeography (/isis/citation/CBB001213315/)

Article Stanley, Matthew; (2012)
Predicting the Past: Ancient Eclipses and Airy, Newcomb, and Huxley on the Authority of Science (/isis/citation/CBB001250835/)

Article Daniel Belteki; (2021)
At the ends of the line: How the Airy Transit Circle was gradually overshadowed by the Greenwich Prime Meridian (/isis/citation/CBB299311935/)

Article Smith, Robert W.; (1989)
The Cambridge network in action: The discovery of Neptune (/isis/citation/CBB000053815/)

Article Daniel Belteki; (2023)
The winter of raw computers: The history of the lunar and planetary reductions of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (/isis/citation/CBB237386451/)

Article Daniel Belteki; (2020)
Trust in Glass: Negotiating the Purchase of the Object Glass for the Airy Transit Circle (/isis/citation/CBB805527244/)

Article Cliver, Edward W.; Keer, Norman C.; (2012)
Richard Christopher Carrington: Briefly Among the Great Scientists of His Time (/isis/citation/CBB001451826/)

Article Stephen Courtney; (2018)
The Historical Meridian: Antiquity and Scripture in the Public Work of George Biddell Airy (/isis/citation/CBB237401119/)

Article Ishibashi, Yuto; (2014)
In Pursuit of Accurate Timekeeping: Liverpool and Victorian Electrical Horology (/isis/citation/CBB001451566/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}